


Feels Like Dying

by SamanthaRose (Drazyrohk)



Series: Dungeons and Dragons [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Drabbles, Dungeons and Dragons, Serial Killers, Space Adventure, Super Sonic Space Travel Go!, Time Shenanigans
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-07
Updated: 2014-09-07
Packaged: 2018-02-16 10:17:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2266002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Drazyrohk/pseuds/SamanthaRose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For someone who made a habit of feeling nothing, feeling so much at once was as close to dying as he had ever come.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a series of original pieces centering around a Dungeons and Dragons character in an original Science Fiction/Fantasy world of my best friend's creation. It centers on the adventures of a character named Darren Bridges, a character who ended up being far more complicated than he or I ever imagined!

It had been two days since he left Chicago. Two days stranded here in the white hot summer of California with no friends, no belongings, nothing more than a thousand dollars and a million questions.

He stayed in one hotel the first night. It took him three hours to stop crying. Two hours after that, he picked up the phone receiver in one hand, and it took him nearly ten minutes to dial the first few numbers. He hung up.

Calling her would just prolong this.

He ate at a restaurant down the street, something he remembered only bits and pieces of. He took a walk around the block to try and clear his head, gather his thoughts so he could continue moving forward. For the first time in years, he didn't feel frustration dredging up the burning need to kill, felt no desire for the hunt.

Was this therapy? Or was this just his own personal hell?

He kept telling himself this was exactly why he never let people get close. This was the situation he had been trying to avoid, but this time he had walked into his own goddamned trap.

The morning of the second day, he went to the library. After watching people for a time and managing to pull himself together in some way, he wandered to a store two blocks from his hotel. There he bought some knives since all of his own had been left behind, and a knife roll to keep them in.

Just in case.

The return to his hotel room found him pacing again. He paced back and forth and waited for the phone to ring. He wanted to pick it up, wanted to hear her voice on the other end telling him everything was going to be okay.

He waited until the small hours of the morning before giving up any hope that might have been left that this was all a bad dream. After that, he left the hotel and began to walk again.

He walked without knowing precisely where he was going. He walked without caring where he was going to end up.

The mood changed somewhere along the way. People were beginning to avoid one another in the streets, glancing over their shoulders and all but running from the buildings that lined the highway to reach cars and cabs. He stopped to watch a news report in the window of an electronics store along with others who knew as little as he did.

Something was happening. People were turning against one another. Rioting in the streets… people were trying to kill one another.

He began to wonder why he had ever gotten on that plane. Her voice echoed in the back of his head as a reminder.

_"Because I love you. And I'm asking you to do this for me."_

He walked with a bit more speed after that, tried to head away from the city and away from the people. There were others with the same idea. The roads were choked with them, all of them heading in the same direction.

Masses of people… the infection wasn't far behind.

It was halfway through the fourth day that he saw one for the first time. She had stopped short, was jostled by the surging crowd for a few moments before she let out a sound he would become very familiar with. A sound at that time he had never heard before in his life. A sound he wished he would never hear again.

He wasn't sure why she singled him out. Perhaps it was because of all the memories he had been drowning in since leaving Chicago, leaving Lacy, leaving his comfortable life and everything he had behind. She threw herself at him, palms splayed and hand outstretched. He held her off the best he could, reached into the knife roll with his free hand. People around him were beginning to panic. The ones ahead began to run, the ones behind began to back away. Tires screeched as people still driving their vehicles slammed on the brakes and stared out their windows in morbid fascination.

He got one of the knives free, using his heavier weight to shove her back. Her eyes, her face… they had a hollow look he had seen before. He saw it every time his knife came down, every time he pulled the trigger on his gun. She was dead inside… She stared at him in confusion, then her expression once again became murderous.

There was no hesitation.

His hand stretched out towards her as she ran at him again, seizing the front of her shirt. He held her at arm's length for a moment while she struggled against him, and with the other hand he drew the knife easily across her throat.

Warm blood splashed his face. She gurgled and spluttered… people were screaming now. Horror blossomed in him as he stared at the woman in his grip.

An innocent.

His hand pulled away as if he had been burned. His stomach churned bitterly as he watched her collapse on the hot sidewalk. As he looked down at his blood stained hands and the knife he clutched in one, he told himself this was all Lacy's fault.

Lacy had damned him.

The little voice of reason in his head, a different voice than the one that urged him to hunt, to kill, whispered softly to him that it wasn't true. Damning him would have been leaving him in Chicago without any warning. Damning him would have been remaining silent while the FBI closed in from all sides. Lacy hadn't damned him… he had damned himself.

But that wasn't true either, was it? The world was damned. It wasn't personal. The whole world was damned. The girl had been dead before he killed her. This wasn't murder… it was mercy.

People stared at him in disbelief, but he didn't waver under their collective gaze. He stared back, his heart pounding in his chest so hard he worried it was trying to escape. He put one blood stained hand to his chest to hold it in.

Then he turned and kept walking. Thoughts gathered, self pulled together, Darren Bridges kept walking. He kept pushing forward. He left the dead girl on the sidewalk, pushed his memories aside and joined the running crowds ahead. This was his world now, all that was left for him. In order to survive, he had to keep moving.

And for the first time in longer than he could remember, he didn't worry about them seeing the blood on his hands. In the end, they would all understand. Either they'd be like the girl on the sidewalk, or they'd end up like him.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which Darren Bridges may or may not be the Space Pope and moving through space at God-speed without a shield is a bad idea. It contains a full flashback of things that happened in chapter 1.

_"Get in the car." Her tone was blunt, her body language tentative and anxious, her gaze everywhere except for on him. It didn't cross Darren Bridges' mind to question her as he climbed into the passenger seat, though it made his skin crawl and his heart race. Something was wrong... this was the first time he had ever seen Lacy act like this. She waited for him to get buckled in, then climbed into the driver's seat, glancing over her shoulder once before buckling in herself and pulling the car away from the curb._

_"Where are we going?" Darren asked after a long moment of silence. Lacy spent more time watching the rear view mirror than paying careful attention to the road, so he chose to be her eyes for her. It had been a few days since they last spoke, and he attempted to remember whether or not there had been any panic in her voice then, any indication of this new, rather paranoid Lacy._

_"The airport." She replied bluntly, checking the mirror again before turning a corner a little too quickly and sharply. A chorus of car horns blasted their way from the vehicles that had been waiting, but Lacy ignored them._

_"I see." Darren rubbed the back of his neck, looking out the window at the scenery flying past. "We're going on a trip?"_

_"You are." Lacy's voice was soft, her hard blue eyes checking the mirror again before turning to regard him briefly when they stopped at a light. Darren tried to meet her gaze, tried to read anything he could in her expression. "I haven't been completely honest with you, Darren Bridges. And now I'm worried I've put your life in terrible danger."_

_Being no stranger to dangerous secrets himself, Darren stared at her in silence. Her eyes were still so carefully guarded... he had never met someone before that he couldn't read like an open book._

_"I don't understand." He chose to say after another moment of silence, gripping the door handle as she flew around another corner. "How could you have-"_

_"I know what you are." She interrupted in a hard voice, an expression of pain crossing her face. "I've known since the day we met, in that bar."_

_A flutter of fear, genuine and disconcerting, fluttered through Darren's gut, the man taking in a slow breath while avoiding looking over at her. It took him a moment to quell the panic inside him, to dull the urges he felt knowing that someone knew, but when he managed to beat it down, he had to laugh.  
"And you stayed."_

_"Of course I stayed. First it was so I could know I was right about you, probably with the intention of turning you in if I was. But as hard as you tried to hide from me, Darren, I saw you. I saw beneath your masks and your lies. Part of me wonders if you wanted me to know your secret just so I would tell you mine."_

_"You're going to presume to tell me now that you honestly care about me?" Darren didn't bother keeping the bitterness and regret he now felt from his voice, turning away from her with his mouth twisted into a sneer._

_"Believe it or not, and I know it's hard for you, I do care about you. That's why I'm doing this." Lacy had that thick, choked sound in her voice, the sound that preceded tears. Darren glanced at her out of the corner of his eye, feeling ugly jolts of emotions he forbade himself to feel for this very reason rushing through him upon seeing her pain._

_"What exactly is it you're doing?" He asked softly, Lacy letting out a laugh herself as tears began to spill down her cheeks._

_"In the jack box... there's an envelope. I want you to take it."_

_"I don't-"_

_"For fuck's sakes, Darren, just take it!" She cried, voice cracking. "I'm trying to save you!"_

_"I don't need saving."_

_"Yes, you do. I'm a former FBI agent, Darren Bridges, and colleagues I've kept in touch with are very close on the trail of the Butcher Killer. They suspect, Darren... They're getting so close, and it scares me." Her words came out in a rush, Darren turning to look at her very slowly as she pulled to a stop at the light before the turn off to the airport. "Take the envelope."_

_He paused for a moment longer, then reached into the jack box and pulled out a long, unsealed envelope. Inside was a plane ticket and roughly one thousand dollars in cash, but he took neither out, looking again at Lacy._

_"You're a good person inside. You're different from other people like you, you do what you do to keep people safe. You don't do it out of spite, you don't do it because you're bored, you do it because you're broken and you know what you're doing is right. I believe in you, Darren Bridges." She was gripping the wheel with both hands so tightly her knuckles were white, and her face had turned an ugly, blotchy red from the tears she was crying. She pulled to a stop in the drop off point, refusing to look at him even when he said her name. "Get out of the car."_

_"You can't expect me to just walk-"_

_"Darren, take the ticket and get out of the car."_

_"I'm not done here yet!" Darren growled ferociously, seizing her arm in one hand. "There is still so much to do-"_

_"Get the fuck out of my car and get on that plane, Darren."_

_"Give me one good reason why."_

_"Because I love you. And I'm asking you to do this for me."_

 

Darren did as he was told after lingering longer than he rightly should have. He did what she asked him, did it because she had asked him, and a part of him inside felt like it was dying as he walked away.

He was convinced that was what dying felt like...

He couldn't have been more wrong.

Every detail of that terrible moment welled up in his mind, became part of all the sounds he heard, all the voices and screams and the sound of the begging, the bargaining. Every killer he had put on the table, every single one that had fallen under his knife, they were all there in his head and jockeying for position with the rest of the terrible memories.

A broken heart was hard to cope with, yes... but dying was much, much worse.

_"There is still so much to do-"_

He tried to cry out for help, but any sound he might have been able to make was lost in the noises. He tried to reach out for someone, but he felt frozen in place. He couldn't see anything... but he could see everything at the same time. He had done this before, he remembered that much, but he didn't remember it feeling like this.

Then it happened... he remembered dying.

Was it a memory, or was it actually happening? In the disorientation that was Folding, he couldn't tell. He died once...

Then he died again. And again. And again...

Somewhere around the seventh death, he felt himself falling. His body jerked, the pain was overwhelming, his chest felt like it was being crushed under the weight of all he was seeing and hearing...

_"All those people... what have I done?"_

Then nothing.


End file.
